PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 3, “The Honey Trap,” features adult situations. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.
Here is Episode 3 of Living with the Infidels. We hope you enjoy the series.
Posted on September 15th, 2010 at 8:06am.
By David Ross. Constructing literature courses is relatively easy, because literary history is so coherent and clearly marked – its nodes are so inarguable. You can no more bypass Austen or Dickens in a course on the British novel than you can bypass London on a trip to the UK.
Film, which I will teach for the first time in the Spring, is different. Unlike poetry or even the novel, film is a living form. It continues to unfold and redefine itself, and it forces one constantly to reconsider what seemed fixed. Bergman, for example, may be the greatest director of all time, but his kind of filmmaking – let’s call it filmed theater – seems everyday less relevant, while Godard, who cannot compare as a directorial talent or philosopher, seems to have put his finger on the future. Whom to prefer? Did Mssrs. Lucas and Spielberg reinvent American mythmaking (Mr. Apuzzo’s view, if I’ve understood him correctly these twenty years), or did they infantilize our popular entertainment (my view)?
And what of those beloved heirlooms of Hollywood’s golden age that are neither entirely art nor merely entertainment, and that, in any case, nobody younger than fifty has particularly bothered to see? Are they historical artifacts, national treasures, charming baubles, or inadvertent masterpieces? In teaching them, do we chronicle the American Spirit or do we dumb down the curriculum? In general, is film high art or popular art – a belated expression of the old Renaissance aspiration, or a symptom of capitalist energy and mass consumption?
Designing my course – “Film and Society” – was a two-tablet headache due to the unanswerable questions above. I was not sure what a film course should be, because I have only a confused idea what film is and what it’s for. In the end, I treated film as high art on the model of literature, not because this makes the most or best sense of film as a medium, but because students have so little exposure to the old Renaissance aspiration, and because no opportunity to complicate their sense of the sufficiency of Avatar and Twilight can be passed up. At the same time, one must make certain concessions (Miyazaki for example) in order to avoid civil unrest and student evaluations drenched in one’s own blood (see here).
Not long ago, I described Into Great Silence (2005), a documentary about life in a Carthusian monastery in the mountains of France, as “one of the more difficult and beautiful films ever made, and perhaps film’s most sincere and respectful attempt to portray the life of religious devotion.” It occurs to me that Ordet (1955), even more so, knows how to bend its Medieval knees (to borrow a phrase from Yeats).
I would have liked to teach the Tykwer-directed, Kieslowski-penned Heaven (2002) in conjunction with A Serious Man (2009). The films are fascinatingly obverse. The former concerns a seemingly compromised woman who experiences a mysterious and miraculous beatitude; the latter, a seemingly righteous man who suffers endless punishment.
My syllabus is still germinal. I would, of course, appreciate any advice. One thing to keep in mind is that the course is already busting a seam. Adding necessarily entails subtracting.
The Palace of Art
Masculin/Feminin
God in the Dock
The Smell of Napalm in the Morning
Earth Abides
Utopias and Dystopias
Brave New World
Other films I seriously – yearningly in some cases – considered, but in the end could find no place for:
Posted on September 14th, 2010 at 11:22am.
PLEASE NOTE: Living with the Infidels Episode 2 – “Voracious Virgins” features raw language and salty situations. If that might offend you, please don’t watch the webisode. Otherwise, enjoy.
Here is Episode 2 of Living with the Infidels. We hope you enjoy the series.
Posted on September 14th, 2010 at 10:12am.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Resident Evil: Afterlife was tops at the box office this past weekend, taking in about $27 million. Frankly I was surprised at how good the film was, and now Milla Jovovich is saying there will definitely be another sequel. I’m there. Please set it in Washington, D.C., if that hasn’t already been done. The undead certainly seem to be living large in our nation’s capitol – at our expense.
• Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere won the Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival this past weekend, and some wags are commenting on the fact that the festival jury was headed by her ex-boyfriend, Quentin Tarantino. I think such speculation is a bit tacky; those two are long-ago Splitsville, and we all know Sofia’s got the filmmaking chops. Give the lady her due, please.
• Speaking of Italian American women, Camille Paglia conducts a marvelous takedown of Lady Gaga in the latest issue of London’s Sunday Times. I’m in complete agreement with Camille: Gaga is such a nothing, an ersatz celebrity if there ever was one.
• Mao’s Last Dancer continues to do nicely at the indie box office. The film recently expanded to 102 screens, and has now taken in over $2 million. These are great numbers, given how the film is being completely ignored by the media outlets who would presumably appreciate its message the most.
• My friend Patrick Goldstein at the LA Times has a wonderful piece out about Werner Herzog’s new 3D documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams, a film covering the 32,000 year old cave paintings at Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc. I will freely say that I am green with envy at Patrick’s opportunity to see 30 minutes’ worth of this film before it heads to Toronto! I worship the ground Herzog walks on, and volunteer to carry his shoes the next time he travels underground, or to the Arctic, or out into Loch Ness or grizzly country, or wherever he next makes a film. In related news, Carla Bruni and her husband recently made a splash in Montignac where they were commemorating the 70th anniversary of the discovery of the Lascaux cave paintings.
• On the sci fi front … the words “Khan” and “Klingons” were suggestively dropped in a recent interview with the screenwriters of J.J. Abrams’ next Star Trek movie. Goodie.
Also: Disney’s forthcoming alien-flick Oblivion has a screenwriter; and some more footage of Tron has been released. I’m still irked by what I reported about that film on Friday. Also: I’m troubled by how vacuous the film’s looking.
• AND IN TODAY’S MOST IMPORTANT NEWS … Battleships’s Brooklyn Decker tells The New York Post today that she’s not anorexic enough, or grungy enough, to be a runway model. “I have boobs. I’m very all-American.”
I’m puzzled by this fixation on her looks, because I thought she landed the Battleship role as Liam Neeson’s daughter due to her idiosyncratic, off-Broadway turn as Anya in The Cherry Orchard. Shows you what I know!
And that’s what’s happening today in the wonderful world of Hollywood.
Posted on September 13th, 2010 at 3:20pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. • Actor Kevin McCarthy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame has died, at age 96. You can read about his life and career at The Washington Post and at The LA Times. McCarthy was a very fine stage and television actor, but he will certainly be best remembered for his role as Dr. Miles Bennell in Body Snatchers. His performance in that film – which modulates from warmth and good humor, to the outer edges of hysteria and terror – may actually be the iconic performance of 1950s sci-fi cinema, and is in large measure what gives that film its dramatic credibility. The ‘invasion’ works so well in that film in large measure because of how, as an actor, he sells it. He will be greatly missed, and we pass along our condolences to his family and friends.
I had the pleasure of meeting Kevin McCarthy years ago at a party hosted by the Russian dissident poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Oddly enough, Mr. McCarthy and I spent much of the evening in conversation together over by the punch bowl(!). He was every bit as warm, gracious and amusing in private as he appeared in public. Mr. McCarthy was quite old at the time, yet robust, and he had a boyish charm and impishness to him even in advanced age; I had the sense that if I asked him to step out on the lawn and throw a baseball around, he’d happily do it. He was quite unpretentious, and drily amused by the unexpected success of Body Snatchers.
As you can imagine, I asked Mr. McCarthy about the controversy over the years regarding the ‘meaning’ of Body Snatchers. Was it an anti-communist metaphor? Was it about anti-communist paranoia? Or just small town life? He politely demurred, and said that the intention of everybody involved with the film was chiefly to make a good thriller.
At the same time, I could not help but notice his presence at the party we were both attending – held in honor of a prominent anti-Soviet dissident. His attendance at this event quietly spoke volumes.
For those of you, by the way, who enjoyed Kevin McCarthy’s turn in Body Snatchers, make sure to check out his guest appearance on the old Invaders TV series, in the 1978 Body Snatchers remake, on Hawaii Five-O, and in Joe Dante’s original Piranha. Those are some of my personal favorites. He also gave a nice performance in Raquel Welch’s Kansas City Bomber, and does a nice (if brief) turn as Marilyn Monroe’s husband in John Huston’s The Misfits. We’ll miss him.
[UPDATE: Ironically, the Blu-ray edition of 1978’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers remake comes out this week, a film in which Kevin McCarthy makes a brief but memorable cameo appearance, riffing off his original character from the 1956 version of the film.]
Posted on September 13th, 2010 at 1:13pm.
By Jason Apuzzo. A few weeks ago we reported to you about a new Australian film called Tomorrow, When the War Began, that was set to unspool for distributors at the (ongoing) Toronto Film Festival. The film is a kind of Australian Red Dawn, based on the hit novel series Tomorrow, When the War Began by Australian novelist John Marsden. The film was written and directed by Stuart Beattie, whose screenwriting credits include Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Collateral, Australia and G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra.
A lot of Australian readers wrote in after that post and offered their own thoughts on the film. I encourage everyone to check out the comments section of that post for some very interesting discussion and background on that project – not to mention some of the more interesting reviews of the film that I’ve read.
Word now comes today from the Hollywood Reporter’s HeatVision blog that plans are already underway for two sequels to the film, based on its early success at the Australian box office. This certainly makes sense, given the overall length of Marsden’s original novel series – which I believe extends to seven books.
Based on what’s in the comments section of our original post, all of this should excite our Australian readers … and hopefully North American distribution rights for this film will be settled in the near future so the rest of can see it. The movie was just screened for distributors in Toronto yesterday.
Posted on September 13th, 2010 at 10:10am.